EVEN the best tended Rose Gardens need a little pruning and replanting. Especially when across the road, rival Volta is blooming with an MFDA Chef of the Year award and other gongs garlanding it recently.
Both establishments are, of course, part of a wider Burton Road food and drink picture, but William MIlls’ Rose Garden stands apart in not trying to be a bar with good food – it is a genuinely aspirational, independent neighbourhood restaurant and Manchester’s suburbs are blessed with very few of this ilk. It looks really smart, too, South Manc Scandinavian minimalist.
We blundered into its latest reinvention by chance. Across to talk shop in Wine & Wallop, our favourite West Didsbury bar and (all but beer buffs look away now) pick up a bottle of the new Cloudwater DPA v3 from the Epicurean bottle shop, we decided dinner in the Garden would hit the spot.
As it happened, it was the first Thursday in the month, date for the first tapas showcase for their new monthly changing menu. Database regulars had convened to pass judgement on what would form the four starters and four mains for the rest of April and until Thursday, May 5. So eight small plates, at appropriately sized prices, confronted us plus a daring new look wine offering – biodynamic, natural, orange – sourced from groundbreaking Settle merchant Buonvino. They do the house wine at L’Enclume, which should be recommendation enough. I have mixed feelings about the Russian palate roulette that is natural wine. Some reds burst with fruit and then fall away down the glass; whites have that tart, could-be-cider feel.
I felt that about the Fillipi Soave Vigne della Bra (£8 for 125cl), which accompanied our exquisite nibbles, sherbert whitebait with Marie Rose sauce (£3.50). Made from 100 per cent Garganega, this five-year-old low sulphur white smelt peachy and herby, belying its pale orange hue, but disappointed in the mouth.
That charge could not be levelled at the procession of dishes that arrived, rather too quickly perhaps, but this was a one-off trial meal and easy to forgive, perhaps only a mini-main of rapidly cooling lamb rump and peas suffering (£8 on the night, £22 as a main). An accompanying lamb sweetbread was cutely executed.
Similarly spot-on deep-frying for crispy poached egg topping shards of ham hock in a pea veloute that constituted ‘green, eggs and ham’ (£7.50 starter on April menu). A side of splendidly hewn truffle and parmesan chips (£4) had arrived by now, along with a bottle of Juan Gil’s Monastrell ‘4 Meses’, juicy, powerful, organic, made from 40-year-old vines and matured in oak for four months (hence the name).
In truth, this conventional red choice wasn’t the perfect match for either of the would-be starters – the evening’s stand-out dish of scallop and apple carpaccio (£10), a delicate treatment of the raw mollusc with cider vinaigrette and spring onion emulsion, and the beautifully presented goat’s curd mousse, harmonising with toasted oats, walnut tuile and raspberry (£7).
Our final savoury was another main (£7 on the night, £18 as a main) that plunged sea trout into a vegetable nage, strewn with mussels, clams and asparagus. Cunningly delicate again, it's our main picture, above. This is not bar food – and all the better for it.
Of the puddings, each a fiver, the ‘white chocolate dome’ was smashing. Eerily resembling its Millennium sibling, it sat in a lavender-flavoured chocolate soup, with a white chocolate crumb, lemon panna cotta and blueberry ice cream perched on the broad brim of the bowl.
A dense triple chocolate ice cream matched with orange armagnac and espresso was more standard but playfully presented, like the rest of a memorable meal.
Often, especially in bars, the small plate obsession palls. At the Rose Garden as a sample of bigger dishes to come, small really was beautiful.
The Rose Garden, 218 Burton Road, West Didsbury, M20 2LW. 0161 478 0747.
